FOUR HEMINGWAY

Dos Passos and Hemingway both transcribe a connection to Paris as foreigners in their narration. Their approach differ from their positions, Dos Passos as a political writer and Hemingway as a literary one. Yet the two share similarities such as their poetic styles in A Spring Month in Paris (Paris) and A Moveable Feast (Feast)’s People of the Seine (Seine) and A False Spring (Spring). Paris and Feast reveal the different mindsets of the Dos Passaros and Hemingway in their narration of Paris. On the other hand, in Three Soldiers (Soldiers) and particularly Spring, there is a parallel between the protagonists’ psyches. 

First, Dos Passos and Hemingway both use a poetic description of Clichy, a suburb of Paris, and Paris respectively. In Paris, Dos Passos enchants us poetic descriptions such as  “narrow domes that looked so naked in the moonlight” in a story about war, which in reality was a devastating experience. Similarly, although ironically to a less degree, Hemingway’s Seine is very charming. He paints a simple portrait of the river, “ with  an “island [that] ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and…a small park at the water’s edge with fine chestnut trees, some huge and spreading, and in the currents and back waters that the Seine made flowing past, there were excellent places to fish.” Dos Passos is uncharacteristically romantic in his recount while Hemingway employs simplicity to craft a modest charm.

Paris, however romantic, is embedded with a sense of emotional distance. Dos Passos states the “funeral” in a matter-of-fact fashion, while economics, through the anecdote of his friend’s “business”, is opinionatedly narrated. The poetic language is reserved for the neutral environment, such as buildings, atmosphere and the emphasized “moonlight”. The intention behind this, I presume, is an attempt to emphasize the reality of human conditions. By elevating the aesthetic aspect of the static surrounding and employing a critical tone in describing social realities, Dos Passos convinces the reader the concerns of his account. 

On the other hand, Feast is entrenched in personal emotions which does not try to exaggerate or downplay Hemingway’s fondness for Paris. He “remember[s] the Rhône, narrow and grey and full of snow water…The Stoicalper was really clear that day and the Rhône was still murky”. This seeming frankness appeals to the reader as a sign of sincerity. Additionally, he weaves in delightful conversations of the everyday with Hadley, leaving us a sweetness in our read.

Indeed, both writers interject their narrations with conversations for an element of reality. Due to the journalistic nature of their text, Feast and Paris features conversations with real-life friends and family while Soldiers features conversations between Andrews and his Parisian acquaintances and Andrews and his military counterparts. The latter is differentiated by tone and language. Between Andrews and his Parisian friends, we see lapses into French within the Parisian circle, and we can sense envy in Andrews as he listens. In the camp, the written colloquial army slang disrupts reading and seemed to be abrasive to listen to for the Harvard-educated Andrews. 

"Goin' to move soon, tell me.... Army o' Occupation. But Ah hadn't ought to have told you that.... Don't tell any of the fellers." "Where's the outfit quartered?" "Ye won't know it; we've got fifteen new men. No account all of 'em. Second draft men." "Civilians in the town?" "You bet.... Come with me, Andy, an Ah'll tell 'em to give you some grub at the cookshack. No... wait a minute an' you'll miss the hike.... Hikes every day since the goddam armistice. They sent out a general order telling 'em to double up on the drill.” 

Andrews persists in using standard English despite his fellow corporate’s “Ah”s and “Ye’s”, revealing an insistence on his identity as an educated man and distinction from the typical, uncouth “soldier”.

The reason for such difference lies in the subject matter and the authors' respective experiences at hand. Feast is Hemingway reminiscing his “old days” in Paris, he was young, happily married, making new friends and enjoying life in a beautiful city. The Modernist arts sphere of the 1920s was much more favorable than the harsh 1910s and looming late 1930s in which Dos Passos was in. 

Dos Passos perceives Paris through the lens of war in Soldiers by selecting a military setting in contrast to Hemingway’s domestic and social setting. This is understandable for Feast is a memoir in which Hemingway shares his personal experiences from a first-person point of view while Soldiers is a work of fiction Dos Passos used to delineate the mentality of soldiers during wartime. The soldiers are stationed outside of Paris, and Dos Passos uses them to express a concept of Paris as an escape from chaos.. His protagonist, Andrews, sees Paris as an intellectual haven. He does not find value in his service, “wishing it had made [him] into anything so interesting” as the “adventurer” Henslowe became as a result.  

We can see similarities in the attitudes towards Paris in Andrews and Hemingway. Both of them lived and loved the “hell of a time with wine an’ women” that Paris offered. The difference lies int he options that the two had. Hemingway had the freedom of choice to choose where to stay: Paris, Spain Cuba, America or anywhere else. 

On the other hand, Paris was almost the only alternative (not a bad one) to the army for Andrews who detested his meaningless camp life. He was possessed by “Unaccountable shame” when he was identified as a soldier. His “ feet had the same leaden reluctance as when they used to all but refuse to take him up the long sandy hill to the school” as he walked back to his un-inspirational camp. The perceived dichotomy between an edifying Paris and a pointless “dull” military life propelled Andrews towards the liberty that Paris seemed to entail. 

Dos Passos occupies himself with socioeconomic issues in his writing while Hemingway gives a a glimpse of those conditions in his recounts. In Paris, Dos Passos directly addresses issues such political differences, workers’ housing”, parliament. He tells us the “perpetually misinformed” social conceptions of Communism and Democracy in those days by sharing how the story of“how the Reds were selling the art treasures of Spain, and about an american woman who was an international Red of the bloodiest type and the mistress of the American ambassador who was a Red too (a Democrat is the same as a Red)” made him “hard not to laugh”. 

Hemingway provided a much more positive and microscopic view of life in Paris. For him, regardless of how financially constrained he was, “did not think ever of [him and his wife] as poor”. While he was aware that poverty was more “hard on” Hadley, for she was not “doing…work and getting satisfaction from it”, Hemingway and Hadley somehow “ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.” This is in stark contrast to Dos Passos more macroscopic take on Paris in Paris and Soldiers.

However, if we were to identify any similarities between Dos Passos and Hemingway, it would be through the character Andrews. Andrews’s philosophical ambitions are parallel to the “hunger” identified by Hemingway. Hemingway was aware of how “lucky” he and his wife were to be optimistic in times when they had to be “tight and mean with money”. What appeared to be a simple-minded happy-go-lucky mindset is added depth as Hemingway and Hadley grew conscious of a “hunger” that leads them to ponder about life and its purpose. They knew that “Paris was a very old city and [that they] were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong, nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”

Similarly, we see this hunger in Dos Passos’s protagonist who is famished for a more “profound fun” than army. He is a character who is passionate about living a life with meaning, whatever that means, and when he was in the routine army life, he too, saw that life entailed more complexity than waiting for a war’s end. He believes that he can attain a meaningful lifestyle with education in Paris and what the Parisian life could offer.  

Dos Passos and Hemingway’s portrayals of the same setting, Paris, are inherently different due to their fundamentally different personalities, interests and agendas. The fact that a city can accommodate such divergence proves its richness and attests to its magic.